Researchers develop spray-on memory

Researchers develop spray-on memory

Need to store some data? You could use a hard drive or solid state storage like the kind found in USB flash drives, SD cards, and SSDs. But soon you might just be able to use an “aersol jet printer” to create storage and spray it onto any surface.

Researchers at Duke university have come up with a sort of spray-on memory that uses nanoparticle inks to store data.

The new technology isn’t going to replace a USB flash drive anytime soon: while it has read/write speeds that rival flash storage, it has a much smaller capacity, at just 4-bits.

In an early demonstration, the researchers used the memory to control a set of LED lights. The 4-bit memory can be programmed to cover 16 different states (with all lights on, all off, or various combinations of on and off).

But assign each bit to something like a number and you can do things like save price tag information or expiration dates. Data can be stored for up to 10 years and it can be rewritten continuously.

And the technology is pretty new, so maybe it’s possible we could eventually see spray-on memory capable of storing more data in the future.